Arcane Mage Gear, Tier Sets & BiS – Legion 7.3.5

This section of the Arcane Mage guide covers everything you need to find the best Arcane Mage gear. It tells you all about gear: stat priorities, armor, tier sets, BiS recommendations from dungeons and raids, and legendary item rankings. This guide is written by Malon, who raids with <Omen> on Emerald Dream EU; his lifelong ambition is to have the Warlock class renamed to 'Fuzzy Cuddlebears'. Find him on Twitter and at Altered-Time mage forums. Updated for the latest patch.

Stat priorities

Arcane is in an odd place for stats, with all being relatively equal (aside from Mastery); there is no one stat to stack and no breakpoints to hit. The best you can do is sim yourself using SimCraft or Raidbots to find your own priorities.

That said, this is a very, very generic list that you can use to ascertain the (extremely rough - seriously, sim yourself) value of a piece of gear:

Versatility > Crit > Haste > Mastery

Legendaries

Scheggia di Exodar - Your own Distorsione Temporale does not cause Sfasato on yourself, and is not affected by similar effects such as Sfinimento. A Mage with this trinket can benefit from two or even three casts of Distorsione Temporale (or similar) spells: once from an ally and once (or twice, depending on fight length) from themselves. Best in slot on any fight where you can get two casts of Time Warp (co-ordinate use with your raid).

Coprispalle dei Primi Kirin Tor - Sbarramento Arcano has a 10% chance per Arcane Charge consumed to launch an Globo Arcano in front of you. The free Orb is the same as the talented version, so this can help you quickly get back up to full Arcane Charge stacks. Although it's a bit unreliable, it's insanely good for AoE. You want this when running M+.

Segreto di Sephuz - Applying a loss of control effect to an enemy grants you 70% increased movement speed and 15% Haste for 10 seconds, with 10% and 2% granted passively. Arcane can only activate this with Esplosione Gelida, which has many downsides (melee range, low damage, not used rotationally), and Controincantesimo. The passive makes it powerful on any fight, however, and it is a great choice on any fight where it can be consistently activated, like Sass'zine or Desolate Host.

Difesa Finale di Belo'vir - Provides an absorb shield equal to 20% of your maximum health after casting Traslazione. This can drastically increase your survivability in the open world, but will be less useful while raiding.

Desiderio Ardente di Kil'jaeden - An on-use effect that causes a massive explosion around your target, on a relatively short cooldown. Powerful at lower gear levels, but in Tomb damage (and mob health) has scaled past the point where this is a viable option.

Fregio della Grande Armata - Increases the effect of the Light and Shadow powers granted by the Netherlight Crucible by 50%. A bad legendary all over. Most of the above choices will outperform this ring for any spec.

Trinkets

The below list is accurate if all trinkets are of the same item level.

Combining Tier pieces

The choice of when, or even if, to drop the two-piece of the previous tier will depend entirely on your personal situation; a two-piece bonus is usually worth keeping over gear many item levels ahead. Arcane generally wants to use 2T20 and 4T21, as long as the item level differences are not too great. What pieces you keep will, again, depend on what drops for you, but as a massive generalisation, the T20 head and back are the best-itemised pieces for Arcane.

The same applies in Tomb of Sargeras, although in when moving in there from T19 content you would want to keep the robe and gloves.

Gear recommendations

Due to the Titan/Warforged system,'best-in-slot' lists are no longer realistic. The below are not BiS lists, but simply the most optimal gear for that particular slot, excluding legendaries (Aman'Thul's Vision does not count towards the Legion legendary limit).

Finding Gear on Wowhead

From simple recommendations to advanced filters, Wowhead can help you find the gear you want.

Item Finder

The Item Finder is a great way to search for gear if you are new to Wowhead's filtering system.

Choose what item category, gear slot, and class specialization you're interested in, and it will return results for you. You can further narrow it down by source--including gear from LFR and heroic dungeons.

Character Planner

The Character Planner returns personalized gear suggestions for you and shows which content has the most upgrades.

Simply load up the planner with you preferred character and it will list gear recommendations in a 20 ilvl range for you. It will also list how many gear upgrades each boss has so you can plan out bonus rolls. Finally, the character planner will perform an audit and let you know if you have any missing enchants, glyphs, or gems.

If you have a character in our Profiler which is great for tracking vanity collections and viewing your character in our 3D modelviewer, you can click on the "Planner" button in the header to access the tool. If you don't, you can just enter your information in at Tools > Character Planner.

Item Filters

Wowhead utilizes a powerful system of item filters to narrow down the gear you need.

On http://www.wowhead.com/items, you can enter in some basic options at the top--the name of the item, its item level, the level the players needs to be. The "Usable by" dropdowns cover factions, class, and role.

The dropdown menu right above "Stat Weights" opens to display a variety of advanced options. These cover the following:

General item info such as Added in Expansion/Patch, BoE/BoP, Unique-Equipped, Class-Specific.

Source: All in-game sources, ranging from raid difficulties to the Black Market Auction House to sold by a vendor.

Miscellaneous: Many of these filters are not relevant to equippable gear such as Crafting Reagents and Toys, but you can filter for items that are currently obtainable.

Once you've selected a filter from the menu, click on Apply filter for search results. You can repeat the process to filter for multiple criteria at once--for example, Agility gear that is found in Mythic Foundry.

Over on the right-hand side of the page, you can select a particular Gear Slot or Quality to narrow results even further.

Finally, you can quickly view a subset of items at once using the Database Menus. Head to Database > Items and mouseover the Weapon and Armor options for quick links to gear arranged by armor type and slot.Back to Top